


A Bird in the Hand

by Thistlerose



Category: Maleficent (2014)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-17
Updated: 2014-12-17
Packaged: 2018-03-01 22:23:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2789834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thistlerose/pseuds/Thistlerose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Over sixteen years, Diaval became Maleficent's wings, eyes, ears, and much more.  There were times when he was glad to help, and times when he wondered if he was losing himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Bird in the Hand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [romans](https://archiveofourown.org/users/romans/gifts).
  * Translation into Русский available: [A Bird in the Hand — Птица в руке](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10354074) by [Synant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Synant/pseuds/Synant)



Diaval served Maleficent faithfully if not always enthusiastically for more than sixteen years. For saving his life, he was bound to her; such was the way of things. Moreover, he had given her his word, and a crow will not break his promise, not to friend or foe, and no matter the circumstances.

Though he wondered sometimes, over the course of those long years, if all that still applied when he wasn't crow-shaped. (And while, at the beginning, Diaval knew in his heart that he was and would always be a crow, whatever his shape, as the years went by and he spent more time as a man, he began to wonder.) A man, after all, will give his word and break it over and over. Maleficent knew that all too well: Diaval was the crow who had first come upon her in the aftermath of Stefan's betrayal; he'd heard her anguished screams from far away and, possessed by a curiosity that he sometimes now regretted, flown closer to investigate. There, tucked away in the shadows of a ruined tower, he'd found her trembling, and he'd known. 

Many creatures might envy a fairy her wings, but only one had the audacity to take them from her, and he could only have done so by guile.

Diaval had guessed the truth the first time he ever saw Maleficent, when he looked at her through the eyes of a crow. And he had known the truth the second time he saw her when, in the fields beyond the Moors she had saved his life from the hunter and his dogs, and he had looked at her through the eyes of a man.

Diaval had known the truth, and he had made his promise. He would be her faithful servant, and more.

He became her wings, as well as her eyes and ears. He spied for her, bringing her news of Stefan's movements. In the early days of his reign, anyway, before, out of fear and - perhaps - guilt, he began keeping council in the dark and damp tunnels beneath his castle, where even an enterprising crow was reluctant to venture. He told her of Stefan's marriage to the old king's daughter and of his coronation - and drew back in fear of his own life when Maleficent's screams once again rent the clouds.

He didn't tell her of the queen's pregnancy, because he wasn't sure; Stefan kept his queen well-guarded and largely out of sight in her royal chambers, and the women who tended her had apparently been chosen as much for their ability to hold their tongues as for their midwifery skills. But when, in due time, a healthy baby girl was born, the shutters of the queen's chambers were flung wide and the whole kingdom rejoiced at the announcement. 

Maleficent must have sensed that something was afoot, because when Diaval came winging back with his news he found her waiting for him at the edge of the Moors. He told her about the baby and steeled himself for the inevitable explosion of rage.

To his surprise, a light seemed to flicker behind her pale green eyes, and her red lips unfolded in a smile. It was a new expression and it chilled him far more deeply than any display of wrath ever had.

"A baby! There will be a christening," she speculated, looking out over the fields and hills to the distant promontory, atop which the towers of King Stefan's castle were just visible against the creamy dawn clouds. She seemed to be speaking to herself, as if she had forgotten that Diaval was there. " _How marvelous._ "

~*~

From the day they met, Diaval had been Maleficent's wings, eyes, and ears. After the christening, after the curse, he became still more. While he continued to spy on Stefan, more often Maleficent sent him to the little cottage in the forest just outside the Moors, where the three renegade pixies were secretly raising the young Princess Aurora.

Perhaps raising was the wrong word. They meant well, Diaval supposed Certainly they were trying. But it became clear very early on that what the three of them knew about rearing a human child could just about fit into a thimble … if one was being generous. During the first few days at the cottage, they went into a flutter whenever the child cried, as if they'd somehow broken her and didn't know what to do. Then there was the matter of the spiders. Humans might look a lot like fairy folk, but their nutritional needs were substantially different.

So Diaval became Maleficent's hands, bringing Aurora flowers filled with nourishing nectar, and toys - clean ones, of course - that other human children had lost or abandoned in the village beyond King Stefan's castle. He did so at Maleficent's bidding, though he told himself he'd have done it anyway, for even a crow can empathize with so small and helpless a human being as Aurora was. (That was what he told himself, and what he told Maleficent when she mocked him for caring so much. But in his secret heart he wondered if it was because he'd already been a man for so long that he couldn't help but pity the plight of another human. But this was something he didn't dare to dwell upon; it was only the dimmest shadow of an idea, and nothing more.)

As a crow, he couldn't sing Aurora lullabies, but he could gently rock her cradle with his claw and bob his head to make her laugh. This he did of his own free will.

Maleficent watched all of this and said little, so Diaval could only guess at her thoughts. He wanted to believe that some small part of her, some dim, secret shadow, understood that _Stefan_ was her enemy and not his daughter, and that she might even be beginning to care for Aurora. 

There were times when she almost seemed to. Despite her initial declaration that she hated the child, as the seasons passed she spent more and more time hiding within sight of the cottage, watching Aurora as she grew. Though she never allowed herself to be seen, she was more attentive to the girl's needs than her three supposed guardians; without Maleficent, Aurora would surely have fallen to her death ere she turned four - really, of all the places to have a picnic, why did the pixies choose the meadow atop a fifty-foot cliff? - or gotten herself hopelessly lost in the woods, or popped a pretty - but deadly - mushroom into her little mouth, or fallen prey to some vicious, wild animal. 

(Mostly she used her magic, but Diaval helped when he could, when he was permitted. In the incident with the wild boar, he was Maleficent's teeth and claws and fearsome roar, frightening the beast away in the form of a bear while she summoned vines to weave a protective net around Aurora.)

At the same time, it seemed to Diaval that Maleficent was only toying with Aurora, allowing her to grow and bloom, to delight in each day when every sunrise brought her closer to her doom. It seemed cruel, not just to Aurora but to all who loved her: her parents (for surely they must), the people who had flocked so eagerly to her christening, the pixies, Diaval himself…

If a crow could love a human. But did he love the child as a crow or as a man? And was there a difference? He wondered.

He wondered as well what Maleficent felt as the years fell away and Aurora went from a being bright and inquisitive child to a beautiful, thoughtful young woman. If Maleficent looked at her and saw only Stefan, and remembered only the hurt and the betrayal, or if she saw Aurora for what she truly was: someone wholly individual and innocent.

Diaval wondered if Maleficent had regrets. He never dared ask her.

~*~

Wings

Eyes

Ears

Hands

Teeth

Claws

All of these he used in the service of Maleficent. And there were times when he wondered, if he wasn't wholly a crow anymore, what was he? And there were times when he was sure he couldn't be anything except for Maleficent's puppet. And sometimes it was worth it (when Aurora stroked his feathers and called him "pretty bird," or on those rare occasions when Maleficent confided in him as if he were her partner and not just her minion). And sometimes he wondered if he'd made a grave mistake when he'd pledged himself to Maleficent.

Like the time she'd turned him into a dog.

A _dog!_

A crow will put up with any number of indignities: in lean times he will scavenge for food without shame, and he will simply shake it off when he falls for farmers' straw men. 

But to be turned into a _dog_ , a beast that chases crows and will fawn over any fool who'll toss him a scrap and call him master…

To Diaval, this was the last straw. Resistance if not outright rebellion had been in the back of his mind for years, a flicker of an idea that he'd never really allowed himself to entertain. A crow will keep his word if he can. But he'd meant it when he'd told Maleficent that he'd rather be the lowliest worm than a dog, and when she'd laughed at his anger he'd begun to think in earnest of ways he might break free.

Iron, he knew, could hurt fairies. And, thanks to Stefan's scheming, there was iron to be found all over the human lands from the castle to the very edge of the Moors. In bird-form, he couldn't carry a sword or spear, and even a small knife would have been difficult to wield. But there were belt buckles, and clasps for cloaks, small rings that had broken loose from chain mail armor, nails, pins, and other bits of scrap. 

A crow is good at finding things. And at hiding things. 

Diaval never actually planned anything, so he would never know what might have been if he hadn't come across Maleficent in the forest one pre-dawn, some scant weeks before Aurora's sixteenth birthday. She hadn't summoned him and he very nearly passed her by unawares, for she was huddled among the knotted roots of an ancient oak, her knees drawn up to her chest and her head bowed. There was no moon, and in the near-perfect darkness her horns were easy to mistake for a pair of broken branches. But then she sighed, a small, dry sound like the ghost of a breeze through the branches, and moved one white hand across her skirt, and Diaval saw her and paused in his hunt for mice.

He lit upon a branch and from that vantage point observed her curiously. She sat that way for a long time, though the ground was cold and damp, and daylight still a long way off. Every now and then, a shudder rippled through her thin frame. She seemed smaller somehow, _diminished_ in a way, and all at once Diaval remembered the first night he'd seen her, after Stefan stole her wings. At that moment, he wished that he were a man-sized crow, so he could put his own wings around her and comfort her. And then he was angry with himself for pitying her, she who had cursed an innocent child and turned him into a _dog_.

Gradually, the sky between the branches turned to lavender, and then the blue of forget-me-nots. As the morning light fell on her, Maleficent slowly raised her head and saw Diaval in the tree looking down at her. She stared at him for a moment, almost as if she didn't know him. Then she sniffed and looked away, over her shoulder into the forest where night's shadows still lingered. 

"I couldn't do it," she said, barely loud enough for Diaval to hear. "I tried to undo the curse. And I couldn't. I hadn't the power. I've doomed her, and I can't undo it."

She looked up at him again, and her eyes were wide and pale as new leaves, and so full of regret that he found he couldn't breathe and meet her gaze at the same time. She was as anguished as she had been the first night he saw her, only this time, Diaval knew, her heartache was for someone other than herself.

And he knew that he would never betray her.

~*~

Diaval was Maleficent's speed, hooves thundering over the low hills as they raced the sun across the sky toward Stefan's castle, with the unconscious Prince Phillip in tow. He was Maleficent's only witness when she realized that she would be too late to save Aurora from the doom she'd laid upon her almost sixteen years earlier. And he stayed by her, though all hope seemed lost, as she made her way painstakingly through the great wall of iron thorns that Stefan had had erected around his castle.

Diaval was also the only one to witness Maleficent herself awaken Aurora with true love's kiss, a thing that she had long believed did not exist. Lacking lips, crows do not kiss, and so Diaval had always been ambivalent toward the idea. But as Aurora's golden lashes fluttered and she murmured, "Hello, Godmother," and as Maleficent turned, a look of incandescent joy in her eyes - Diaval decided that he did believe, ardently. And also, that if his only reward for sixteen years of service was to be this scene, it would have been enough. He would have been satisfied.

But afterward--

After Maleficent made him a dragon so he be her fire and her scaly armor

After Aurora found and restored Maleficent's magnificent wings

After Maleficent defeated King Stefan

When the barriers dividing the human world and the Moors had been torn down, and Queen Aurora accepted her rightful place as the leader of both kingdoms

Maleficent turned to Diaval and said, "You're free to go, of course. I release you from your oath." She didn't look at him as she spoke, but at Aurora, who, heedless of the damp earth, had knelt by the edge of a pond to chatter with a pair of nixies. The afternoon sunlight lit up her hair, making it shine brighter than jeweled diadem she wore. 

"And in what form would you send me out into the world?" Diaval said lightly. Now that they'd reached this moment, he wasn't sure what he wanted. He'd entered this world as a crow, but when you've learned to love in other forms, can you ever really go back to just one?

"In whatever form you like," Maleficent replied, her eyes still on Aurora. Now Prince Phillip had joined her by the pond. "Will that be your reward? The power to change from bird to man of your own free will?"

His skin tingled. "Can you do that?"

For a long moment, he wasn't sure she'd heard; the words had come out so softly. But at last she turned and looked at him, her lips curved in a smile. "Ah, Diaval. I shall miss you."

She meant it, he thought. That act of true love had unlocked something in her, as surely as it had drawn Aurora out of her enchanted sleep. So Diaval said, also meaning every word, "If I have the power to choose my form, surely I have the power to go or stay. I'll stay for as long as you need me."

In the silence that followed, he wondered if he'd overstepped. She had wings of her own again, and her kingdom was at peace; surely she had no more need of him, and it had been presumptuous of him to suggest that she might. Bird or man, what did he have to offer her?

Maleficent threw back her head and laughed. It was a sound like bells ringing faraway, like the first murmurs of a brook after the thaw. "Oh, Diaval," she said, and something in her sideways glance made her seem unexpectedly young to him, almost girlish. "I shall always need you. Don't you know that by now?"

He did.

12/16/2014


End file.
